Session 6 Roundup

Sapporo, JapanMarch 16, 2015

Canada got back to winning ways against China Photo: WCF/Richard Gray

Olympic champions Canada returned to winning ways when they beat China 7-1 in Monday morning's sixth session of round-robin play at the ZEN-NOH World Women's Curling Championship being held in the Tsukisamu Gymnasium in Sapporo, Japan.

This was Canada's third win out of four games and it was as straightforward as the one-sided score-line suggests.

China had last stone advantage in the first end and blanked it. After that Canada manufactured steals in the next four ends - one point in the second end, two in the third, and singles in each of the fourth and fifth ends for a 5-0 fifth end break lead.

China scored their only point in the sixth end when skip Sijia Liu drew her last stone into the house.

Canada then scored one point in the seventh end when skip Jennifer Jones hit out a Chinese stone, and stole a single point in the eighth end for 7-1, when China conceded.

This win was in contrast to Canada's loss to Sweden in the previous session and about that Canada's Jones said: "It's always nice to bounce back from a loss with a win and I thought we played a lot better today, so hopefully we'll carry that through."

Scotland also bounced back from defeat in this session, beating USA by 9-2 in just six ends.

The Scots scored two points in the first, third and fifth ends, while USA could only score singles in the second and fourth ends.

In the sixth end, the Scots had built a collection of stones in the house and when USA skip Aileen Sormunen was heavy and wide with her final stone of the end, the Scots stole three points for a 9-2 lead, at which point the USA, still looking for their first win, conceded.

After the game, Scottish skip Eve Muirhead said: "That was more like us out there, really good. We were just solid, just taking our twos and forcing the ones, it was pretty simple. It was a good performance after last night's defeat."

Like USA, Denmark were winless as they played in this session against opponents Switzerland, who had been unbeaten till this point.

This was a tighter game. The Danes led as the teams went into the seventh end before Swiss skip Alina Paetz drew her final stone into the house to score two points and reduce the Danish lead to 6-5.

Switzerland took the lead in the ninth end, but in the tenth end a last stone hit by Denmark skip Lene Nielsen gave her team the two points needed to seal their first win of the week, by 8-7.

Afterwards, Nielsen said: "Right now I feel great and relieved. We've had three very rough games and we haven’t really been able to pick up our game when we needed to. We did today and I think as a team we played better."

In the fourth game of the session between Finland and Germany, the lead changed hands numerous times.

With the score at 3-2 to Finland, Germany's skip Daniela Driendl drew her last stone into the house to score two points and take a 4-3 lead in the fifth end.

Then in the seventh end, Driendl's last shot was also a draw and she scored two points again to take a 6-4 lead.

Driendl drew her last stone into a collection of stones clustered around the four-foot ring to concede a one-point steal to Finland in the tenth and final end, however, Germany still emerged winners with the final score 7-6.

During the round robin portion of a competition, teams with the same win-loss record will be listed alphabetically, by their three letter code, and ranked equal.

World Curling TV (WCTV), the television arm of the World Curling Federation, will provide extensive live and video-on-demand coverage to broadcasters around the world from Sapporo. The full broadcast schedule is here: http://wwcc2015.worldcurling.net/schedule

In addition, curling fans around the world will be able to follow selected live coverage of the 2015 World Championship events via the World Curling Federation’s YouTube Channel www.youtube.com/WorldCurlingTV